the eagle in iqbal's poetry

180 Pages·2014·1.43 MB·English

by  Muhammad Usman Akbar

I R
QBAL EVIEW
Journal of the Iqbal Academy, Pakistan

April 2001
Editor
Muhammad Suheyl Umar
IQBAL ACADEMY PAKISTAN
Title : Iqbal Review (April 2001)
Editor : Muhammad Suheyl Umar
Publisher : Iqbal Academy Pakistan
City : Lahore
Year : 2001
Classification (DDC) : 105
Classification (IAP) : 8U1.66V12
Pages : 180
Size : 14.5 x 24.5 cm
ISSN : 0021-0773
Subjects : Iqbal Studies
: Philosophy
: Research

IQBAL CYBER LIBRARY
(www.iqbalcyberlibrary.net)
Iqbal Academy Pakistan
(www.iap.gov.pk)
6th Floor Aiwan-e-Iqbal Complex, Egerton Road, Lahore.
Table of Contents
Volume: 42 Iqbal Review: April 2001 Number: 2
1. GOD: THE REALITY TO SERVE, LOVE AND KNOW ................................ 6
2. THE EAGLE IN IQBAL’S POETRY .................................................................... 33
3. THE REVOLT OF ISLAM ....................................................................................... 46
4. THE ANTHROPOCOSMIC VISION IN ISLAMIC THOUGHT .................. 59
5. RESPONSE TO “THE ANTHROPOCOSMIC VISION IN ISLAMIC
THOUGHT” ................................................................................................................ 85
6. RETURN OF THE “NATIVE” .............................................................................. 90
7. THE ISLAMIC ECONOMIC SYSTEM ................................................................ 98
8. THE CASE OF MUSLIM SCHOLARSHIP ........................................................ 110
9. ALLAMA IQBAL— NEWS, VIEWS AND EVENTS: A SURVEY OF THE
ENGLISH NEWSPAPERS OF PAKISTAN DURING 1952 ......................... 127
10. MODERN WORLD AND ITS CHALLENGES ............................................... 149
11. ALLAMA IQBAL CONFERENCE: TEHRAN —FEBRUARY 24, 2001 ... 157
12. ISLAMIC UNITY IN VIEW OF ALLAMA IQBAL ......................................... 163
13. IQBAL DAY— EMBASSY OF PAKISTAN, DUSHANBE, TAJIKISTAN
....................................................................................................................................... 167
14. INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON “AL-GHAZALI’S LEGACY: ITS
CONTEMPORARY RELEVANCE” ................................................................... 171
15. PATHS TO THE HEART ...................................................................................... 176
16. FIRST GRADUATE STUDENT CONFERENCE ON IBN SINA. ............ 179
GOD: THE REALITY TO SERVE, LOVE
AND KNOW
Seyyed Hossein Nasr
In the Islamic tradition it is with this sentence meaning “In the Name of
God-The All Good, the Compassionate” that all legitimate daily acts
commence and surely I could not begin a conference on God without
beginning with this statement which is also the profoundest commentary
upon the Divine Nature as it relates to not only humanity but also to the
whole of creation. The two Divine Names al-RaÁm«n and al-RaÁâm are both
derived from the root r. Á. m. that is also the root of the word raÁâm
meaning womb similar to the word rehem for womb in Hebrew which
belongs to the same linguistic family as Arabic. The world and we amidst it
are born from the womb of the Divine Mercy without which we would not
even exist. The very substance of cosmic reality is the “Breathe of the
Compassionate” (nafas al-RaÁm«n) as the Sufis assert and to mention God’s
Names, RaÁm«n and RaÁâm, is to be reminded of that Mercy from which we
have issued forth, in which we live whether aware or not of our real natures
and to which we ultimately return if we remember who we are and accept
that great “trust of faith” to which we must consent by our free will as
human beings.
From the point of view of traditional teachings the relation between the
Divine Source and creation rooted in this Mercy is a relation that transcends
time and becoming time being nothing but one of the conditions of our
terrestrial mode of existence. God at 2000, the title of this conference, should
not for one moment imply a temporal condition set upon that meta-historical
relation. What is much more important to realize than what we comprehend
by “God at 2000” is the truth that the world at 2000 like every other world at
whatever moment of time it might be is a reflection of a meta-temporal
reality and is rooted in that reality whatever might be our passing
understanding of things. Perhaps rather than speaking of God at 2000 one
should speak of the world at 2000 “in” God, for multiplicity is at every
moment mysteriously plunged in Him.
The organizers of this conference have asked the speakers to speak of
God from an experiential and “personal” point of view which is usually not
my preference. I would have rather spoken of God in a manner which
transcends the personal idiosyncrasies of individual existence. Nevertheless,
having accepted the invitation to speak in this important conference at the
beginning of the new Christian millennium about the most important of all
subjects, I am obliged to begin by saying something about my background
and education in as much as they are related to my understanding of the
subject at hand. But my purpose most of all is to write a few humble words
about God from the point of view of the Islamic tradition to which I belong.
I was born and brought up in a Muslim family in Persia from which I hail
originally. My family ambience was one in which the reality of Islam was very
strong and the dimension of transcendence and the reality of God was felt
and experienced everywhere. My childhood years were inseparable from the
constant observation of the sacred rites of the daily prayers and the ever
present chanting of the Qur’an, which for Muslims is the verbatim revelation
of God and His very Word. Not only my maternal family hailed from a long
line of famous religious scholars or ‘ulama’, but my father in addition to being
a great scholar and thinker was also devoted to Sufism, the inner or mystical
dimension of Islam. Sufism is the heart of the Islamic revelation although
today unfortunately some in the West seek to divorce it from Islam and
propagate it in a diluted fashion which is far from its authentic reality.
I remember that at the very young age of five or six, in addition to
memorizing certain verses and chapters of the Qur’an, I was guided by my
parents to learn and memorize some of the poems of the greatest Persian
Sufi poets such as Rëmâ and À«fiï. With in their incredible spiritual depth,
these poems often sang of the unity of religious truth, of the universality of
religion, of crossing religious frontiers. They constituted my first lessons in
what has now come to be known as religious dialogue and they planted
within my mind and soul the seed of a tree which was to grow in later years
and become an important axis of my soul and a central concern of my mind.
I will just quote one poem from memory by the supreme troubadour of love
both human and divine in the Persian language, À«fiï, a poem which I had
already known before the age of ten. Its imperfect translation is as follows:
In love there is no difference between the Christian monastery and the temple of the
Magi,
Wherever there is anything, there is the Light of the Face of the Beloved.
I was brought up in such a tradition and I have never left it. At a very
young age an intimacy was created in my soul with the Divine Reality, the
Reality which was and remains for me at once all-encompassing and all-
caring, universal and yet source of particular sacred forms, all loving and yet
awesome. The reality of the divine tremendum, the Majesty of God, has always
been combined in my understanding of God with His Love and Mercy and
of course His Beauty, the Divine Names of Majesty (al-Jal«l) and Beauty (al-
Jam«l) complementing each other perfectly in the Islamic perspective. There
are verses of the Qur’an, the sacred scripture of Islam, which speak of God
as the utterly Other, the Transcendent, the Beyond, as that which has no like
and Islam, like Judaism, emphasizes the Oneness of God above all else. And
yet there are other verses of the Qur’an which speak of the intimacy of God
with us, of His Love, one of His Names being al-Wudëd which means
precisely Love and of course as already mentioned the Qur’an speaks of the
Mercy of God which “embraceth all things”. The Qur’an states that God is
closer to man than his jugular vein, of the fact that wheresoever we turn
“there is the Face of God.” In a profound sense the journey of the soul to
God is an oscillation between these two poles of majesty and beauty, farness
and nearness, a movement both horizontal and vertical without which no
spiritual journey would be complete. Awareness of these two aspects of the
Divine Reality and the proper orientation of our soul and in fact the whole of
our being accordingly is necessary in order for us to realize the Divine Origin
of our existence, to fulfil the purpose of our journey here on earth and to
smell the fragrance of the Divine Reality. God is both transcendent and
imminent and we must realize both of these dimensions but it is also
necessary to add that there is no possibility of the realization of the
Immanent without that of the Transcendent.
Returning to my personal life, I was sent to the West to continue my
studies when I was quite young, being therefore plucked from the protective
ambience of Persia and my family before my mental outlook was completely
formed. Coming to America did not, however, mean immediate immersion
in a secular ambience. Before going to M.I.T. I underwent the second part of
my secondary education at the Peddie School in New Jersey, a Baptist school
where despite being a Muslim I had to attend church every Sunday. That
experience came to complement my later intellectual study of Christianity
and was precious despite the strangeness of its form. The flame of the love
for Christ inculcated in the hearts of Muslims in general and emphasized in
my own upbringing in particular was strengthened although I continued of
course to view Christ as the greatest prophet before the Prophet of Islam
and not as an incarnation which Islam, basing itself in its understanding of
God on the Absolute Itself rather than Its manifestation, rejects. The great
love for ‘¥sa ibn Maryam, that is Jesus son of Mary as the Qur’an calls him,
has abided in my heart to this day and in fact has deepened on the basis of
that early existential encounter with Christianity as well as much later study
and meditation.
It was also a Peddie that the gifts God had given me in the sciences and
especially mathematics became manifest. I received some of the highest
scores ever achieved in both local and national mathematics tests and so all
my teachers advised me to become a scientist. I also felt enthusiastic about
studying physics, the mother of modern sciences, and went to M.I.T. with
great joy and expectation to discover the nature of physical reality. It took me
many years and much more introspection to realize that what I wanted to be
in reality was a physikos in the sense given to it by Parminedes, considered by
many as the father of Western philosophy, a physikos being a person who
sought to understand the nature of things in an ontological sense and not
only in appearance. But while only a sophomore, I discovered that modern
physics does not in fact deal with the nature of reality, even physical reality in
itself, as I had thought. Much reading in the modern philosophy of science,
most of it based on positivism, confirmed this fact for me. As I have written
in my intellectual autobiography which is to appear in the Library of Living
Philosophers 1 dedicated to my thought, it was a lecture and later a more
personal meeting with Bertrand Russell, the famous British philosopher, in
Cambridge that proved to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. He

1 See “Intellectual autobiography of Seyyed Hossein Nasr”, in The Philosophy of Seyyed Hossein
Nasr, (edited by Lewis Hahn et. al.) Library of Living Philosophers, Open Court, 2001, pp.
1-85.
asserted that in fact physics deals only with pointer readings and
mathematical structures and not with the nature of physical reality itself in
the ontological sense.
After that encounter I decided to leave the field of science once and for
all. But I decided to complete my degree before making a change. I remained
therefore in the field of the sciences for a few more years, completing my
bachelor’s degree in physics and mathematics at M.I.T. and my master’s
degree in geology and geophysics at Harvard. Meanwhile I was studying
philosophy and the history of science parallel with my scientific studies and
finally turned to them for my doctoral work. This whole experience of
modern science and especially the positivistic philosophy of science being
then propagated as well as the whole agnostic and to some extent atheistic
climate in which I was studying provided a major challenge to my theocentric
worldview. But being the type of person that I was, I could not leave any
form of knowledge presented to me alone but had to study and seek its
meaning and examine its claims.
For many years starting with my M.I.T. days I studied Descartes, Hume,
Kant, Hegel and other Western philosophers up to those of the
contemporary period including Whitehead. Of course the immersion in the
world of doubt cultivated by the mainstream of post-medieval European
philosophy shook the framework of my intellectual world but it did not
affect my faith in God nor that inner and intimate relationship with the
Divine that I had experienced since childhood. Nevertheless, it created a
major crisis within my mind and soul. I am in fact one of the first orientals to
have faced such a crisis fully without succumbing to the tenets of
modernism. My response, after some period of anguish, meditation, study
and introspection, was in fact the total rejection of the whole adventure of
Renaissance humanism and Enlightenment rationalism, in other words the
very foundations of modernism. Since then my intellectual life has been
dedicated to providing answers on the basis of traditional teachings,
especially but not exclusively those of Islam, to the challenges posed by
modernism and queries which arise from its rejection. I have sought to
discuss the consequence of severing the link between reason and intellect in
the sense used by a St. Thomas and the reduction of the latter to the former.
I have dealt extensively with the consequences of the anthropomorphism
prevalent in the West which absolutizes the terrestrial human state and makes
earthly man “the measure of all things”. In this sense modern science is of
course completely anthropomorphic since it is based solely on the human
senses and human reason no matter how much it seeks to exclude man from
a cosmology limited to the physical realm but extended to vast expanses of
space and time.
At the moment of intellectual crisis when I was reading avidly Western
philosophical works and also looking anywhere that I could for intellectual
guidance which could re-establish for me the certitude upon which my whole
outlook was based until my M.I.T. years, I discovered the works of the
authors who are called the traditionalists or expositors of primordial wisdom
and the perennial philosophy, foremost among them René Guénon, Ananda
K. Coomaraswamy and Frithjof Schuon. These authors opened many doors
for me and provided the crucial knowledge based on certainty which I was
seeking. They also provided the in-depth criticism of the modern world
which allowed me to see clearly the nature of that world and to formulate
succinctly ideas concerning that world whose meaning had been still
ambiguous and tentative in my mind until then. They presented pure
metaphysical knowledge to which my mind was drawn like a moth to the
candle. And they opened my eyes to the vast world which was both non-
Islamic and non-Western, embracing both the Far East and Hindu India.
A. K. Coomaraswamy was perhaps the most outstanding and certainly the
most authentic expositor of Hinduism and Buddhism in this country in the
first part of the twentieth century. By what would appear as chance I came to
meet his widow, he having passes away in 1947 some five years before. This
meeting in turn gained for me access to the incomparable Coomaraswamy
library in which I spent countless hours for several years reading about
various traditions, especially Hinduism, Taoism and Buddhism. Although art
was not my field, as a result of the influence of the works of Coomaraswamy
I took nearly every course on Hindu and Buddhist art at Harvard and met
nearly every important person dealing with Oriental religions and art who
came to Cambridge such as D.T. Suzuki. These studies and experiences had a
great effect in reconfirming on an intellectual plane what I had already
intuited as a young man, namely that the splendour of the Face of God is to
be found in different religious climes.
Wherever I journeyed intellectually, if I found in that world a philosophy
rooted in the Divine Reality, I felt at home there. I soon came to realize that
my spiritual home is wherever the Divine resides no matter in what form It
had manifested Itself or in what language It had said “I”. This realization was
of course related in its intellectual aspect to the discovery of the perennial
philosophy or the philosophia perennis which the traditional authors expounded
and which became and remains my philosophical outlook. The perennial
philosophy is based on a set of universal truths which its followers believe to
lie at the heart of all authentic religions and traditional philosophies. One
might in fact assert that there is but a single Truth spoken in different
languages which constitute the various worlds of sacred form. Moreover, this
oneness does not at all overlook differences on the formal plane nor the
preciousness of each sacred form despite its difference from other forms.
The perennial philosophy sees unity on the level of inner or transcendent
reality and not on the formal plane nor does it ever confuse unity with
uniformity. This discourse is of course not on comparative religion but on
God. Nevertheless, it is necessary to point to this central issue because in the
contemporary world others’ views of God can and often do affect our own
views.
It was also during my years of formal university education that I
embarked upon the spiritual path within the Sufi tradition. This is a matter
about which I prefer not to speak publicly but for the sake of honesty it
needs to be at least mentioned especially since the Sufi path has determined
the conditions and provided the light and guidance for my life long quest for
spiritual realization. Since my twenties, at the heart of my life has stood the
quest for God and that quest has remained central throughout all my other
activities from teaching and writings to founding or running academic,
cultural and educational institutions. What I have to say about God is the
fruit of not only the studies and the experiences briefly outlined, but above
all of marching upon the Path which leads to Him. The result of following
the Path is of course dependent not only on the efforts of the traveller upon
the Path, but above all on Divine Grace and affirmation.
There is a well-known Taoist saying according to which, “Those who
know do not speak and those who speak do not know”. This saying refers
not only to the ineffable nature of veritable esoterism about which the sage